ern intent" from day to day, and whose joy becomes at
times almost a supernatural rapture, may descend through circles of
hell to the narrowest and the lowest; he may mount from sphere to
sphere of Paradise until he stands within the light of the Divine
Majesty; but he will hardly succeed in presenting us with an adequate
image of life as it is on this earth of ours, in its oceanic amplitude
and variety. A few men of genius there have been, who with vision
penetrative as lightning have gazed as it were _through_ life, at some
eternal significances of which life is the symbol. Intent upon its
sacred meaning, they have had no eye to note the forms of the
grotesque hieroglyph of human existence. Such men are not framed for
laughter. To this little group the creator of Falstaff, of Bottom, and
of Touchstone does not belong.

Shakespeare, who saw life more widely and wisely than any other of the
seers, could laugh. That is a comfortable fact to bear in mind; a fact
which serves to rescue us from the domination of intense and narrow
natures, who claim authority by virtue of their grasp of one-half of
the realities of our existence and their denial of the rest.
Shakespeare could laugh. But we must go on to ask, "What did he laugh
at? and what was the manner of his laughter?" There are as many modes
of laughter as there are facets of the common soul of humanity, to
reflect the humorous appearances of the world. Hogarth, in one of his
pieces of coarse yet subtile engraving, has presented a group of
occupants of the pit of a theatre, sketched during the performance of
some broad comedy or farce. What proceeds upon the stage is invisible
and undiscoverable, save as we catch its reflection on the faces of
the spectators, in the same way that we infer a sunset from the
evening flame upon windows that front the west. Each laughing face in
Hogarth's print exhibits a different mode or a different stage of the
risible paroxysm. There is the habitual enjoyer of the broad comic,
abandoned to his mirth, which is open and unashamed; mirth which he is
evidently a match for, and able to sustain. By his side is a companion
female portrait--a woman with head thrown back to ease the violence of
the guffaw; all her loose redundant flesh is tickled into an orgasm of
merriment; she is fairly overcome. On the other side sits the
spectator who has passed the climax of his laughter; he wipes the
tears from his eyes, and is on the way to regain an inse